2000 as seen by people from 1900

Interesting how some of the predictions did become an everyday reality

I just laughed my ass of

9 most badass bible verses

Over Engelen, Goden en Helden: Kent er iemand dit boek

Ik ben wat aan het rondkijken wat de nadruk in dit boek is.



Ik had het zien liggen in de Standaard boekhandel en ga er de volgende keer eens wat meer in bladeren, het lijkt mij wel interessant om een basis aan mijn dochter te geven, het lijkt mij een redelijk neutraal boek maar ik zou toch wat meer zekerheid daarover willen, en ook of de manier waarop religie aangekaart word open laat of het waarheid is of niet.
Het zou spijtig zijn moest het een boek zijn van het type "alle religies hebben een gemeenschappelijke oorsprong en daarom is religie uiteindelijk wel juist, oh ja en god bestaat" ;-)

Update (15/01/2008): Ik heb dit boek deze weekend nog eens bekeken in de Standaard boekhandel en toch besloten het voorlopig niet te kopen. Het lijkt inderdaad een boek dat ervan uitgaat dat de lezer een geloof heeft, dat geloof gewoon universeel is, en dat religies presenteert door enkel de "mooie" delen ervan te tonen (ik heb enkel de eerste paragrafen gelezen).

Ik ben natuurlijk geen voorstander van direct aan kinderen het verhaal van Lot of Abraham te vertellen (of de hel, of het doden van ongeboren baby's ...) maar de confirmerende taal over de waarheid van die mythen vind ik voor mij niet passend. Voor mensen die niet het gevaar hebben dat hun kinderen geïndoctrineerd kunnen/zullen worden kan dit een fijn boek zijn om de (mooie) delen van verschillende religies te tonen, bij mij zal dat (voor 1 religie) wel getoond worden door mijn vrouw/haar familie, en valt mij de taak om te tonen dat andere religies dat ook hebben (hier zou het boek kunnen helpen) maar ook dat er niet zo mooie kantjes zijn en dat niet geloven ook mooi en zingevend kan zijn (en hierin faalt het boek volledig)
Indien er een hoofdstuk over niet geloven in stond had ik het gekocht.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Ben Steins voice is even duller as in that Bueller movie, can he get any more dull.

Here's PZ's elaborate response, if anyone, anyone, anyone's entitled to it it's him, he got interviewed for it!
Expelled, coming up fast

i'll hug him and kiss him and call him Muhammad

AND THEN I'll EAT HIM!!!!





'Muhammad' teddy teacher arrested

I keep saying unbelievable but it's starting to loose it's meaning.  I'm not even surprised anymore.

Have I gone militant?

I took this quiz when I started this blog, back then Militant Atheist was not so high, I was more Apathetic, a lot has changed.
But I'm still 100% a Scientific Atheist, that I like ;-)

What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Scientific Atheist These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 100% Militant Atheist 75% Spiritual Atheist 67% Apathetic Atheist 58% Agnostic 50% Angry Atheist 42% Theist 17%

That was quick

We probably all read this, and thought, how will we answer when those anti-stem cell activists say " see !!! you don't need to kill babies"

Well the answer came very quick by that protector of the scientific way PZ Myers at Pharyngula

Also, a very interesting article about religion and science (from before this discovery)
Reading the comments on PZ's post I as others started to wonder what the new and conservative christians will say when it will be possible to make real embryo's from just skin cells, will they get a soul?  will it be considered murder?

Their fantasies can be so entertaining, but it is so sad that they have to be taken so seriously.

Until this stops

Until writers can express their critisism without physical danger.

Until verbal or written criticism is met with at most a verbal or written response (muslims gotta learn to take criticism gracefully!) and until reports of violence or inhumanities done in the name of islam are at most about single individuals, islam can not be accepted as moderate.
The violence has come so far that any report of violence (even by individuals) should be followed by a widespread and highly publicized condemnation by all the "normal" muslims.

Excuse of the day/week/month

Gotta have an angle when blogging so I'm gonna try this and see if I can keep it up or not.
I'll put up an excuse that believers put out and give my opinion on it.
Don't know yet if it'll be day/week or month, here goes.

Excuse:

When a believer is presented with the condom problem (you know, AIDS is killing people in Africa, the vatican or other religion is opposed to condoms thus they have at least some blood on their hands)
A believer will come back with the argument that the religious message also says that there should be no premarital sex and that people shouldn't have multiple partners.
So in essence the believer says that people chose to ignore the part of the advice about marriage but still listen to the "no condoms" message so it's not the church or religion's fault/responsibility, if people really listened to the church they'd be OK.

 
Yes, it is a lame excuse but one that I see returning every now an then.
Several ways of responding, first, the message against condom use is usually a lot louder and most of the time is complemented by real actions like the crazy archbishop of Mozambique, in some countries the church effectively banned condoms so even if people would like to disregard the "no condom" message they cannot.
Also in most countries with large populations infected with AIDS (and lets be honest in most countries period) not using a condom is the default position, it is not that people are selectively listening to only part of the message, people have to be taught condom use and the church's message is sabotaging any effort by good organizations who want to educate people and provide at among others also the option of condoms.
And the so called "good message" of no sex before marriage or not having multiple partners does not help the large and growing group of people married to someone infected with AIDS, they're usually not advocating "no sex" during marriage (though the vatican is thinking about the righteousness of this particular dogma).

Happy everything

Got this in the mail, and I don't pass up on a convenience that makes my life easier.
Happy Everything!

Strike at bible printer

So you think making bibles is good steady job?

Think again, the workers of Splichal are on strike because management wants to let 27 of the 59 employees go.
Reasons: weak dollar and competition from China.
God probably has a "Made in China" stamp somewhere ;-)

Here's a Dutch article about the strike and one in French
Couldn't find an English source.

Edit:
This post on The Stubborn Curmudgeon! may be related to the problems at Splichal :-)

Aquarian Gospel

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2213087,00.html

So that is then before he went to the US to start up the Mormon church.

In 1935 a Shinto priest claimed that instead of being crucified, Jesus had fled to Japan where he lived to be 112. He married a Japanese woman, had three daughters and became a respected teacher and prophet

That sounds a lot more exciting, he probably also was a ninja, that walking on water always made me wonder.
Now a ninja sword would be a lot cooler than the crucifix and if he committed sepuku it would be a real hero to look upto, and no one could be blamed like the romans or the Jews are now.

Wikipedia

I'm on Wikipedia trying to add a little to the community ;)

My first real edit was removing a supposed deathbed conversion of Joseph Conrad
I actually traced it back to user Homagetocatalonia
He seems to enjoy putting his fantasies into pages, plenty of comments asking for references to edits that he's made, nice values there christian soldier.

Now if only I had more time ...

Interesting point

Brusselsexpats makes an interesting point here that has been de-constructed very well by other commenters already but I'd like to put my response on my blog since the argument behind it is used so much, posting it on the Cif site would be pointless as it would be drowned in the thousands of other comments and I'm not looking for an argument.

Here's his point:

So atheism didn't tell the tyrants to go out and kill but it didn't stop them either did it? So much for moral grandstanding.

What tyrants he's talking about doesn't matter, there have been so many tyrants it is statistically sure that some of them were atheists (and we do know that some of them indeed were). This can also be enlarged to encompass murderers, thieves, rapists and any other kind of evil or inhuman behavior.
So it boils down to "atheism doesn't stop evil"
First let me state the obvious, this has no bearing on the truth value of atheism
So then, who ever claimed atheism would stop evil?
Actually since atheists don't believe in that all encompassing plan by god we pretty much acknowledgment the fact that evil (both human and natural) is a part of life.
What we do claim is that atheism stops religious evil, and the reason for that claim is obvious, no dogma, no enforcement of arbitrary rules from ancient books full of really hateful rules, ...
And (and this is important) atheism does not carry a historical dogma, it can be changed.
In re-reading this post my burdensome ability to "see the other side" was acting up again:
Some religionists will claim that the absolute basics of atheism (non belief in god(s)) in itself is or could be an attribute that is not beneficial to humanity so I'm not going to say that atheism can be changed anymore, the basics of atheism "non belief in god(s)" is unchangeable.

If atheism would carry a moral code and say how we should act it could be something like humanism to which I as an atheist subscribe. Its Humanist Manifesto is already on there 3rd edition so it is pretty obvious that humanism is not based on an unchangeable dogma like religion.

Anyway as it stands it has been sufficiently shown that it was not atheism that caused those particular tyrants to act so evil, in fact we can successfully argue that what gave those evil tyrants the possibility to act was more like religion.

And off course the claim is very easily reversed "religion doesn't stop evil" (plenty of historic and current events demonstrate this)
Here too, this has no bearing on the truth value of religion either.

update: I will sometimes just write what I think and then later see some possibilities of misunderstanding what I meant because of how I constructed the sentence plus I have a great (sometimes annoying) sense of "seeing the other side" so at first is seems so clear in my head and it still does but I can see how someone who did not grow up like me or did not have the same experiences as me would not see the logic of my point.

Ah IN YOUR FACE

Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue prays for rain to end the ongoing drought.

God was busy with more important things!

Guiding a priest in a game to the 25.000 euro treasure so that the church tower can be fixed

Can't find an English article but it's pretty obvious what has happened, the priest attributes his winning to god and prayer.
Take that Georgia, that church tower is much more important to god's plan than y'all or they can pray better!

free your mind

Yup, this blog is in that Out Campaign blog roll

The reverse is equally true

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad , Under Western Eyes, 1911
English (Polish-Ukrainian-born) novelist (1857 - 1924)

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37780.html

It's true

Pope leads prayers for rain

Now how did I get to that ...

Well, this post at Cynical-C had a comment that lead me to the snopes page about it, from there I read Religion In The News and thought that one about the pope can't be true, and whatdaya know, it's true.

He's done it

Scalzi went to the Creation Museum

been reading his report while I should have been working!
Damn creation museum!

And he's got pictures (with comments) too:

Sir David Attenborough on God

Practically all I know about nature comes from him. A great man.

And so I complete another 950 million km trip

And I just recently learned that I shared my birthday with Carl Sagan, sad that he's no more.

November 9

If this was a videotape it would be worn out by me ;-)


Well I'm off for another round trip around the sun ;-)

The dot-com bubble

In anticipation of the markets opening I stumbled upon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

I remember those days and am not proud that I too bought stock without even knowing what the actual company was about.  I was lucky to only have a few hundred dollars to trade with at that time 'cause they're part of the $5 trillion that is no more ;-)

(religion just doesn't seem to be so much on my mind when money is at stake)

I liked today's "Quote Of The Day"

"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
-- John Buchan

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/68.html

Not so happy

Just got slaughtered a little on the stock market today.
Good thing I'm already playing with the market's money or I'd have to cry a little, lost more than 25% in 3 days, ouchy ... but I'm confident that it will return, the GPS industry is still in it's infancy.

wedgie-proof underwear

who else thinks it is a good idea to be on national TV (and the internet) when you're probably being bullied. They seemed to speak out of experience when they said that wedgies hurt.

Swamped

Swamped at work and having too much fun with my daughter after work to be blogging.
In the mean time, this is quite an interesting read:
Religious Belief
By Charles Darwin